I velieve in sandwhiches

Sandwiches, a staple in any culture in many different shapes, sizes, and flavors. Sandwiches have been around for almost as long as history itself, a simple easy food to make out of bread and ingredients like ham, lettuce, or turkey.

Any place you travel to you, can see the multitude of styles, a large Dagwood size sandwich piled high with pastrami and sauerkraut in the raw city of New York, New York. A baked flat bread sandwich with many succulent white meats like chicken in the salty costal cities of the Mediterranean, or my personal favorite, a long submarine sandwich with the works like fresh lettuce, ripe slices tomatoes, eye watering onions, crisp olives and fresh honey ham.

With all these differences that culture influences on the basic form of cooking comes a striking similarity. Sandwiches bring people together and having a good time. Whenever you go to a cookout or restaurant to have a good time there is always plenty of sandwiches to be had. These sandwiches represent more than just some food thrown together, but food that has meaning to someone. Peanut Butter and Jelly is in anyone’s childhood memory, or bringing a homemade sandwich in your brown bag to lunch in elementary school.

Sandwiches don’t just have a spot in the past either, today many stores, that are the life and soul of people, are all around the world for purely making their own type of sandwiches. Companies revolve around how good their sandwiches are or letting the customer stylize their own sandwich such as Subway or Jimmy johns. There is no doubt going to be an evolution of sandwiches, with people experimenting to find new combinations of these ingredients to create the next “ultimate” sandwich.

But, no matter how much you look into this history, present and future of the sandwich, it still remains a few pieces of bread, some meat, vegetables and whatever you want in it. It’s the most simple and complicated item that you can create and the most similar and different food to be found across the globe. I believe in sandwiches, I believe in the taste of sandwiches and the art of making sandwiches, or the variety of sandwiches and the complexity of the sandwich and all the places you can go with a sandwich. Most of all I believe in eating sandwiches.

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This week’s essay

Growing up in the former Yugoslavia, lawyer Djenita Pasic enjoyed the peace of her religiously diverse country. But after the fall of communism and the outbreak of the Bosnian War, Pasic was forced to reevaluate her ideas about religion and tolerance. Click here to read her essay.